Penny Arcade Shake Up Kickstarter

Established web comic Penny Arcade has turned to Kickstarter for funding, hoping to be able to raise enough money for the site to go ad-free for a year. But some are not happy about project, saying that this isn’t what Kickstarter ‘is for’.

Penny Arcade’s first goal is $250,000, which it says will be enough money for it to remove the leaderboard ad on the front page. The overall aim, or ‘stretch goal’ is $1.4 million, at which point it will be able to go completely ad-free for the whole of 2013.

What’s fascinating about this fundraiser is they are mostly looking to cover operating costs such as “rent, wages, health insurance, utilities, all the normal stuff that you pay for when you have fourteen souls working together.” Because of this, the rewards on offer are very different to what we’re used to seeing on Kickstarter. For example, for $1 or more, “Gabe will shout out your name as he chases a duck” and for $15 or more, Gabe will both chase a duck on your behalf and “think about you during sex”. Both irresistible offers, to be sure.

Further up the pledge scale, the rewards seem a little more normal, with offers of digital books, games, Penny Arcade Singles, and other mostly non-physical benefits. But the key thing is that the rewards are extremely cheap for them to produce, meaning that more of the money they raise can go towards operating costs.

What gets me about this is that they want a million dollars to make the site ad free FOR ONLY A YEAR.

Or:

It’s cool that they want to change their model — but it all just feels so massively vague and intangible to me based on the way they wrote the entire campaign; what happened to Kickstarter requiring specific projects?

Or:

Not that I don’t think it’s a worthwhile idea, it just seems to be an odd fit for kickstarter granted that they’re already rather successful.

The objection regarding the amount of money that Penny Arcade want to raise is due, in my opinion, to a simple failure to understand the overheads involved in running a business employing 14 people. The objections based on it not being a ‘specific project’ strike me as ridiculous: It has a clear aim, is bounded in time and purpose, and the rewards are mostly of some genuine value even, so it clearly is a discrete project, even if it’s not the same sort of project as what we’re used to seeing. And the idea that already successful projects shouldn’t use Kickstarter is just weird: you need to have an established community before crowdfunding will even work for you, so cutting off the most successful would be self-defeating in the extreme for Kickstarter.

The amount of dogma that’s grown up around Kickstarter in the few short years it has been running is surprising. One Kickstarter commenter said “KS is generally reserved for new inventions”, which is clearly not the case. Many of the most successful projects are founded on the basis of an existing property. Order of the Stick, a web comic which has been around for nearly a decade, used Kickstarter to fund reprints of its existing books as well as new work, raising $1.2 million in the process. And smaller projects like Fireside Magazine and P Craig Russell’s Guide to Graphic Storytelling have used Kickstarter not just to do one issue, but a second and, in all likelihood, further issues as well.

Kickstarter is a platform, just like IndieGoGo, Ulule, RocketHub, Crowdfunder and all the rest. They each have their own Ts&Cs, each have their own focus, so for example you can’t fund a cause on Kickstarter but you can on IndieGoGo. Crowdfunder, Kickstarter and Ulule use an all-or-nothing model, whilst IndieGoGo and RocketHub give you the option to keep however much you raise. RocketHub allows you to stage your goals, automatically unlocking additional perks as you hit intermediary goals, whereas Kickstarter forces you to run those ‘stretch goals’ manually.

But within those different features sets, guidelines and limitations, what individual users do with the platform is up to them. The final arbiter should always be the public: If enough people are interested in a project, it will succeed but if people think the idea is terrible then they just won’t give it money. That Penny Arcade’s fans have already pledged $227,704, with 33 days to go, show that there is support for their particular use of Kickstarter.

And this is important, because too often crowdfunded projects underestimate or ignore overheads. Penny Arcade are, rightly, drawing attention to the fact that there’s more to running a creative business than simply drawing comics. If you don’t earn enough to pay wages, insurance, rent, utilities bills, then you don’t actually have a business, no matter how creative you are.

(Thanks to @olganunes @smarimc @tcarmody @EscapePodComics @kylecassidy @mollydot and @bethofalltrades for the fascinating Twitter conversation that led to this blog post!)